A Growing Self-Organizing Neural Network for Lifestyle Segmentation

Product design management is an increasingly important concept, research into which is remarkably scarce and focuses on determining universal best practices. The purpose of this paper is to show the evidence of the diversity of design management approaches in a specific sectorial context: the Spanish ceramic tile industry. This will be determined through a comparative case study of four companies that are representative of this sector. The study reveals two approaches to product design management: the first, followed by design innovators, considers design to be of great importance, invests heavily in design, gives their designers extensive creative freedom, enjoys good communication and interaction between departments, provides abundant information for the design of new products, takes a broad view of design, and has a team-work approach towards the new product process. The second approach, followed by design followers, does not consider design as a strategic matter, does not invest heavily in design, is customer driven, experiences poor communication and interaction between departments, provides little information for the design of new products, takes a narrow view of design, and its approach towards the new product process tends to be individualistic.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems maintain amongst others the specifications and designs of product, process and resource artefacts and thus serve as the basis for realizing the concept of Virtual Manufacturing, and play a vital role in shortening the leadtimes for the engineering processes. Design of new products requires numerous experiments and test-runs of new facilities that delays the product release and causes high costs if performed in the real world. Virtualization promises to reduce these costs by simulating the reality. However, the results of the simulation must predict the real results to be useful. This is called virtual confidence. We propose a knowledge base approach to capture and maintain the virtual confidence in simulation results. To do so, the provenance of results of real, experimental and simulated processes are recorded and linked via confirmation objects.

New product design and new product process design are important attributes in order a company to survive and sustain in competitive market. However, many new products which have been developed from research and development cannot compete in world market due to product performance issue. In addition, design of new product is unable to cope with the process design and machine capability in manufacturing process. The aims of this study is to identify the relationship between new product design and new product process design on new product performance in manufacturing industry. Random sampling and survey have been used by distributing questionnaire to 400 respondents for final study. Finally 80 respondents had replied with the respond rate of 20%. The study result shows that the extent level in new product design and new product process design are moderate and high level respectively. Furthermore, there is a significant relationship between new product process design and organisational performance (r(80) = 0.570, p < 0.05) in SMEs. However, there are no significant relationships between new product design and organisational performance (r(80) = 0.092, p > 0.05). The study is important for SMEs to gain insight on the effect of new product design and new product process design towards organizational performance.

PurposeThis paper aims to revise the ideal ratio for selecting new products based on their qualitative analysis of desired/undesired functions.Design/methodology/approachThe Kano model has been integrated with the ideal ratio to select and prioritize the design of new products. First, the functional analysis method in value engineering was used to determine the attributes and functions of each product design. Then, the Kano model was used to determine the type of each product attribute and to use the desirable functions of attractive attributes, one-dimensional, must-be and undesirable functions of reverse attributes in the ideal ratio to select and prioritize the design of the product. To examine the application of the proposed approach, a gas instruments manufacturing company was investigated, and five new products were selected for the study.FindingsBased on the results, the product design of industrial regulator GS 77/22 was selected as the superior product and the digital diaphragm gas meter, ultrasonic gas meter, axial regulator and turbine gas meter had the second to fifth priority, respectively.Practical implicationsThe proposed method can help product designers determine product designs suitable for customers' expectations and provide a desirable prioritization of the product design in terms of their ideal ratio according to the customers.Originality/valueThe proposed approach provides a more desirable prioritization compared with other prioritization methods based on customers' viewpoints. In the proposed method, the Kano model results in respecting customers, understanding community needs, respecting consumers' rights and increasing the organization's social responsibility, which will significantly increase the chance of product success in the market.

Infrared (IR) images are essential to improve the visibility of dark or camouflaged objects. Object recognition and segmentation based on a neural network using IR images provide more accuracy and insight than color visible images. But the bottleneck is the amount of relevant IR images for training. It is difficult to collect real-world IR images for special purposes, including space exploration, military and fire-fighting applications. To solve this problem, we created color visible and IR images using a Unity-based 3D game editor. These synthetically generated color visible and IR images were used to train cycle consistent adversarial networks (CycleGAN) to convert visible images to IR images. CycleGAN has the advantage that it does not require precisely matching visible and IR pairs for transformation training. In this study, we discovered that additional synthetic data can help improve CycleGAN performance. Neural network training using real data (N = 20) performed more accurate transformations than training using real (N = 10) and synthetic (N = 10) data combinations. The result indicates that the synthetic data cannot exceed the quality of the real data. Neural network training using real (N = 10) and synthetic (N = 100) data combinations showed almost the same performance as training using real data (N = 20). At least 10 times more synthetic data than real data is required to achieve the same performance. In summary, CycleGAN is used with synthetic data to improve the IR image conversion performance of visible images.

Today, after a fifteen years period of progressive evolution, the design of new products from the metallurgy of special steels and alloys area has become fundamentally based on the intensive use of modelling devices covering both microstructure design and process description. These tools, today well implemented inside industry companies, combined with conventional experimental investigation lead to faster innovation results, steadier solutions, and contribute to increase performance and competitiveness.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the nature and policy implications of the shift from producer‐centred product and service design to innovation by the user, specifically internet‐supported collaborative design by user communities.Design/methodology/approachAn overview of the importance of innovation by individual lead users is followed by a description of collaborative innovation by user communities. The authors then focus on policies, which need to be re‐examined in the light of the shift from producer innovation to collaborative user innovation. The authors conclude by making some suggestions specifically pertinent to Chinese government policy, in a region, which is emerging as a major player in global innovation.FindingsAn important form of user innovation–Internet‐supported collaborative design of new products and services by user communities–is likely to progressively supplant producer product and service design in many fields. This shift will require changes in governments' innovation policies, for example, with respect to intellectual property rights (IPRs).Originality/valueIn line with emerging research findings, this paper takes a user‐centred view of the innovation process. It proposes applicable strategies, which will enhance the effectiveness of this novel innovation paradigm in a Chinese context.

&lt;div class="htmlview paragraph"&gt;Concurrent Product/Process Development is a multi-disciplined approach to the design of new products which forms a cooperative team consisting of members of the manufacturing, purchasing and quality assurance groups as well as product design. This paper will review the key elements of Concurrent Product/Process Development, identify the disciplines required and highlight the cost-benefit tradeoffs.&lt;/div&gt;

CLSC design with simultaneous consideration of product design for manufacturing and remanufacturing

The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of computer-aided design (CAD) and design for environment (DFE) principles as competent enablers of the traditional product design process. In this regard, integration of CAD and DFE principles is proposed which gives light to various stages of the contemporary product development process. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a case study involving the development of a tennis ball retriever concept. This paper makes several contributions to the product design industry in terms of identifying the design errors and modifying the design accordingly when the product is still in the initial stages of development. Furthermore, the proposed integration of CAD and DFE principles is considered to be highly valuable for its implementation in similar product development situations to achieve agility in the design of new products.

States that, in the industrial context, change needs rigorous control, and product design and development, which are crucial to innovation, need rigorous management. Defines design management as the specific management of the design resources in any business. Suggests, by looking at several case studies, that the importance of design management in product development should be given serious consideration. Concludes that, by paying the correct amount of attention to managing the design of new products, the best option for beating overseas competitors is being used.

Wildland fire management decision-makers need to quickly understand large amounts of quantitative information under stressful conditions. Categorization and visualization “schemes” have long been used to help, but how they are done affects the speed and accuracy of interpretation. Using traditional fire management schemes can unduly restrict the design of new products. Our design process for Ontario’s fine-scale, spatially explicit, daily fire occurrence prediction (FOP) models led us to develop guidance for designing new schemes. We show selected historical fire management schemes and describe our method. It includes specifying goals and requirements, exploring design options and making trade-offs. The design options include gradient continuity, hue selection, range completeness and scale linearity. We apply our method to a case study on designing the scheme for Ontario’s FOP models. We arrived at a smooth, nonlinear scale that accommodates data spanning many orders of magnitude. The colouring draws attention according to levels of concern, reveals meaningful spatial patterns and accommodates some colour vision deficiencies. Our method seems simple now but reconciles complex considerations and is useful for mapping many other datasets. Our method improved the clarity and ease of interpretation of several information products used by fire management decision-makers.

Material appearance modeling should involve end user testing. These tests can be visual comparison experiments where decisions made with real physical samples are compared with choices done using computer graphic simulations. This type of evaluation is necessary to determine whether simulations derived from material appearance models can be used to accomplish such tasks as the design of new products or the sale of manufactured goods. Lighting conditions, viewing circumstances, decision criteria, and user expertise can vary widely in each situation where the results of material appearance modeling are used to make a choice. An experiment is currently underway to perform such tests for automotive paint simulation.

Special Issue on Focused Areas and Future Trends of Bio-Inspired Robots “Analysis, Control, and Design for Bio-Inspired Robotics”

Customers benefit from the ability to select their desired options to configure final products. Manufacturing companies, however, struggle with the dilemma of product diversity and manufacturing complexity. It is important, therefore, for them to capture correlations among the options provided to the customers. In this paper, a data mining approach is applied to manage product diversity and complexity. Rules are extracted from historical sales data and used to form sub-assemblies as well as product configurations. Methods for discovering frequently ordered product sub-assemblies and product configurations from ‘if-then’ rules are discussed separately. The development of the sub-assemblies and configurations allows for effective management of enterprise resources, contributes to the innovative design of new products, and streamlines manufacturing and supply chain processes. The ideas introduced in this paper are illustrated with examples and an industrial case study.